Q&A: Herman Winick, accelerator physicist and human rights activist

Throughout his long career as a high-energy and accelerator physicist, Herman Winick was on the front lines in the development of synchrotron light sources. He helped invent critical components such as wigglers, permanent magnet undulators, and free-electron lasers. “My strength is in recognizing bright ideas and helping to make them happen,” he says. “It really has been a revolution.”

Condensed-matter physics, materials science, structural biology, medicine, environmental science, archaeology, and other fields use synchrotron light to probe the structure of matter from the subnanometer to millimeter scales. Storage rings have proliferated. There are now dozens around the world, in both developed and developing countries.

Winick was involved from the start in what ended up as a 20-year odyssey to build SESAME, a regional light source in Jordan. Through that work, he also became involved in defending human rights: He lobbied university administrators, initiated and participated in letter-writing campaigns, and hosted visiting at-risk scholars in his home. (During a taxi ride in Amman, Jordan, on the way to SESAME’s opening celebration in May 2017, I heard Winick ask the driver how many women had suffered honor killings in that country in the past year. Winick says he asks that question regularly during visits to the Middle East, to show people that Westerners care about human rights.)

Today Winick, 86, continues to work on behalf of endangered academics and researchers.

PT: How did you get into physics?

WINICK: During the depression, people with PhDs in many areas could not find jobs, so they went into teaching. I benefited from that, because among those people was my high school physics teacher. When I filled out my college application, I put physics as a likely major. I went to Columbia in New York City in 1949, and they tracked me into physics. I stayed in physics—and at Columbia—for my undergraduate and graduate studies.

As a graduate student, I did experiments in high-energy physics using pion beams. They were made at Columbia’s Nevis Laboratory, about 20 miles north of the university. Nevis had a 450 MeV proton synchrotron, one of the largest in the world at the time. Then I did a postdoc at the University of Rochester. They had a similar proton synchrotron, so I continued to do that work. Along the way I got interested in accelerators.

PT: Where did you start your career?

WINICK: In 1959, as my postdoc ended, I happened to sit down at an American Physical Society meeting with Stanley Livingston, who was recruiting for the Cambridge Electron Accelerator [CEA], a joint project at Harvard and MIT. I was hired as a staff scientist, primarily involved in designing and commissioning the 6 GeV cyclic electron synchrotron. When it came on in 1962, it had a very brief reign as the highest-energy electron accelerator in the world. Then SLAC came on with its 20 GeV electron linear accelerator in 1966.

PT: How did you become involved with synchrotron research?

WINICK: Later, we were still focused on electron–positron collisions at high energies, but x rays as a side parasitic secondary program was coming on. I became fascinated by synchrotron radiation and worked more and more on that. Scientists in Wisconsin, and also in France and the Soviet Union, had low-energy storage rings that supported programs using synchrotron radiation.

The advantages of a constant radiation source led NSF to call for proposals for an electron storage ring that could provide x rays in the tens of keV range. Stanford won out with an inexpensive, parasitic proposal to exploit synchrotron radiation emitted by the SPEAR multi-GeV collider when it ran for high-energy physics research.

To my surprise, I got a call from Seb Doniach, the leader of the Stanford proposal, to join the Stanford project. I went there in June 1973. It was still considered a risky venture—would a storage ring work as a light source at multi-GeV energies? I was in charge of developing the technical design, construction, and commissioning of the first beamline on SPEAR. We got our first beams in March 1974.

One of the first experiments done at Stanford was by Peter Eisenberger, who was then at Bell Labs. He was using the brightest commercial x-ray tubes to measure the absorption spectrum of the x-ray beam striking a thin copper foil. In about 10 days of around-the-clock operation, he obtained a ragged spectrum showing fine structure above the K-absorption edge; by Fourier transforming such spectra, information can be obtained about the local environment of the absorbing atom. Eisenberger came to Stanford and did the same measurement on the same sample using x rays from SPEAR. The radiation was five orders of magnitude more intense than in the x-ray tube. In about 20 minutes he got a result with 10 times better signal to noise.

These early advances made a deep impression on me. I knew we were on to something.

PT: Where are things going now?

WINICK: Rarely do you get to see such fast development in any field. In the early 1990s, Claudio Pellegrini from UCLA made a presentation on how an electron linac such as SLAC could be used to drive a free x-ray laser. He proposed that self-amplified spontaneous emission by an intense electron beam in a long undulator would lead to lasing without the need for an optical cavity. I realized that this was a direction we must pursue at SLAC. Many of us worked for several years developing ideas, and as a result the pulses have been getting brighter. Now SLAC has another $1 billion from the Department of Energy to replace the first kilometer of the copper linac with a superconducting linac to enable higher pulse rates.

PT: How did you become involved in SESAME, the synchrotron in Jordan?

WINICK: After the Berlin Wall came down, Germany started planning a 1.9 GeV light source called BESSY II. I was invited to join the advisory panel. Also on the committee was Gus Voss, my good friend from our Cambridge days. At one of the last meetings of this advisory panel, I asked, “What are you going to do with [the 800 MeV predecessor machine] BESSY I?” The surprising answer was, “There is steel, iron, and copper. We can make money selling it for scrap.” I immediately said, “That’s a terrible thing to do. A very productive machine like that should not be given that fate.” I turned to Gus and said it should be donated to the Middle East.

Gus and I sat in the corner and thought about what we could do to upgrade the machine using many of its components. A few months later, Gus was at a meeting in Turin, Italy, promoting scientific cooperation in the Middle East. He discussed the idea of BESSY I going to the Middle East, and scientists from the Middle East expressed interest. I’ll never forget the day Gus wrote me something like, “In spite of the fact that it was your idea, it seems not to be a bad idea.”

Gus got UNESCO, the German government, and BESSY directors interested in the project. We worked with many others, and my spontaneous suggestion from September 1997 finally became reality in the form of SESAME, which opened in May 2017 .

PT: How did you happen to help the nuclear physicist Hadi Hadizadeh come to the US from Iran? (See the interview with Hadizadeh in Physics Today, July 2005, page 30 .)

WINICK: I met Hadi at an early SESAME meeting in Berlin. We both arrived a day early, so we went to dinner and spent some time together. We’ve been friends ever since. For a while we corresponded weekly, planning the scientific workshops for SESAME. Then I stopped getting a response from him, and a few weeks later I got an email from his wife. She said Hadi was in jail for political reasons. I started a letter-writing campaign to get him released. He spent four months in solitary confinement, he was tortured, but they finally let him out.

We got him support from Scholars at Risk, with $20 000 in matching funds from his thesis adviser at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. That was in 2003. He was in the US for several years until he returned to Iran, where he is now retired.

PT: What other human rights activities have you engaged in?

WINICK: I was chair of the forum on international physics at the American Physical Society. I was involved with an initiative by Andy Sessler and others at UC Berkeley to support dissident Soviet physicists Yuri Orlov, Anatoly Shcharansky, and Andrei Sakharov. And, largely energized by my experience with Hadi, I’ve been trying to get Stanford to support scholars at risk. In 2007 I showed the [then] Stanford president, John Hennessy, a letter that Derek Bok, the president of Harvard, wrote to Harvard faculty, saying they should help scholars at risk. Hennessy opened his eyes wide and said, “Harvard does this? We have to do the same.” He gave me $60 000 in discretionary funding, with which we brought three scholars at risk to Stanford. I’m still working to get an endowment set up to bring over endangered scholars on an ongoing basis.

PT: What would you have done had you not become a physicist?

WINICK: I was really interested in anthropology, partly because I read Patterns of Culture, by Ruth Benedict. The basic thing that comes out of the book is that societies select from a broad spectrum of human characteristics a particular characteristic or two that they want to emphasize. If you are born with a tendency to be a spiritual leader into a society that emphasizes combat, or vice versa, you are a misfit. That made a deep impression on me. And calling people misfits because they don’t fit into your particular society is not right.